From the Archives – Chicago Reporterhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com
Investigating race and poverty since 1972Fri, 14 Dec 2018 14:10:37 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9On the map for education coveragehttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/map-education-coverage/
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:08 +0000http://chicago-reporter.dev.cshp.co/map-education-coverage/It was just three paragraphs, but the conclusion of Sharon McGowan’s 1976 school funding investigation caused a political stir in Illinois.

McGowan had discovered that $85.5 million in federal funding earmarked to help Chicago’s 212,434 “poverty children” in the 1974-75 school year had been instead spent for general purposes throughout the public school district. The fund, created by Title I of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, was intended to improve academic performance at schools with a high percentage of low-income students, most of whom were black.

“I made a mistake in not realizing that it was the most important part of the story. It would have been better in retrospect if I had led with that,” said McGowan, now the editor-in-chief of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Still, her findings drew a flurry of media attention. “That put the Reporter on the map for the board of education. We got a lot of credibility for the beat after the story,” said McGowan, who is also president of Complete Communication, a consulting firm.

Two years earlier, a class-action lawsuit based on claims similar to McGowan’s findings had been dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The decision was based on the grounds that Chicago Public Schools had instituted programs to correct teacher-student ratios and funding disparities.

But McGowan’s story found that, during the 1974-75 school year, CPS spent 7.3 percent more on instruction at richer, mostly white schools than in black, mostly poor schools. Average reading and math scores were also lower at the city’s “poverty” schools.

After the story was published, a statewide political debate ensued. Some argued that the fund should be used to target specific schools that were falling behind, while others still insisted that improving the entire system was the best way to help poor students.

In December 1976, CPS Superintendent Joseph P. Hannon released a plan for how to distribute the district’s $174 million in federal aid for 1977-78: Nearly $95 million for “poverty students” and nearly $79 million for those with special education needs.

]]>A park is a park? Not alwayshttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/park-park-not-always/
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:06 +0000http://chicago-reporter.dev.cshp.co/park-park-not-always/In the summer of 1975, Stephan Garnett was fresh out of college and in his first journalism job at The Chicago Reporter. He was assigned to investigate the Chicago Park District’s funding practices.

He soon ran into an obstacle: The district would release data on the number of seesaws or soccer fields in the parks–but not how much money went to each park.

So he followed the advice of Reporter founder John A. McDermott: Do some legwork and visit the hundreds of parks and play lots across the city. “I looked at everything from the huge parks–Washington, Lincoln, Douglas–to the tiniest play lots,” he recalls today.

During one such visit to Marquette Park on the city’s Southwest Side, Garnett, who is black, was attacked and beaten severely enough to be hospitalized. Then his car was burned.

Garnett said the beating received more attention than it deserved. But, in retrospect, he should have been more careful, he added. After all, Marquette Park is in the same neighborhood where, in 1966, a brick was thrown at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as he led a march to fight for open housing. The neighborhood was rife with racial tension.

Garnett eventually recovered from the attack and moved on to the City News Bureau of Chicago. The story bounced around the Reporter’s office until it landed on the desk of Tom Brune, a circulation manager-turned-reporter.

Brune, who later became the Reporter’s managing editor, took Garnett’s work–conversations with field house directors and park employees, and photographs documenting the discrepancy between facilities in white and minority wards–and dug deeper. He got a major break when he discovered a directory of park facilities published by the district. “Essentially, they had pulled it together–located every park and all their facilities by ward, so that the alderman could take credit every time the park district did something,” Brune said.

Brune headed for the computing center at Northwestern University, where he worked to convert his handwritten code sheets into punch cards using a specialized keyboard–all to analyze his data.

He had to be meticulous. One misplaced comma or period would have aborted the entire process, and he would have to start over. In the end, he produced 1,200 to 1,300 punch cards to cover the city’s 570 parks.

He eventually pieced together enough evidence to prove what Garnett had seen: Parks in the city’s white wards enjoyed more funding, and better facilities and programs than those in minority wards.

Brune’s story prompted a three-year federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. In May 1983, after almost a year of negotiations, the park district agreed to upgrade park facilities and services in the city’s minority wards.

]]>Charges of disorderly conduct–against the policehttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/charges-disorderly-conduct-against-police/
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:05 +0000http://chicago-reporter.dev.cshp.co/charges-disorderly-conduct-against-police/In November, a federal jury ordered the City of Chicago to pay $850,000 in damages to Karolina Obrycka, a bartender who was beaten in 2007 by off-duty Chicago police officer Anthony Abbate. The beating had been captured by surveillance video: Abbate pushed Obrycka to the ground and repeatedly punched and kicked her after she stopped him from going behind the bar.

The video was sensational enough, but the incident attracted media attention for the Chicago Police Department’s alleged attempt to downplay and cover up the beating.

According to court documents, officers who responded to the incident that night allegedly failed to report Abbate’s last name and occupation, let alone the existence of surveillance video. Abbate and at least one fellow police officer also allegedly threatened to falsely arrest Obrycka for cocaine possession, and a bribe was offered with the promise that her medical bills would be paid, provided she remained quiet.

In 2009, Abbate was convicted of aggravated battery and sentenced to probation. He was then fired by the department.

As he reflected on the case in November in his Columbia College office, Wilfredo Cruz said the story was all too familiar. “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” said Cruz, author of a 1982 story that examined the code of silence.

“Rogue cops do bad things, and the department doesn’t do anything. They just get a slap on the wrist, and the city pays out a huge settlement. Thousands and thousands of dollars a year,” said Cruz, now an associate professor of sociology and director of the Latino and Latin American Studies Minor program at Columbia. “But the question is that, if these cops aren’t doing bad things, then why are they doling out all this money?”

Back in 1982, the tactics of the Chicago Police Department may have seemed harmless enough at first glance. Police were conducting sweeping arrests, often after perceiving an increase in gang activity, and charging disorderly conduct. The problem: Many of those arrested were not actually committing crimes: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a heavily populated area. Arrestees would spend a night in jail because they could not make bail. The next day, their cases would be dismissed because officers failed to show up to court. The department used these sweeps as a form of gang control and to “prevent serious crimes from happening,” Cruz found.

But others saw it as a form of harassment, as those arrested had to lose a day’s work and the charge remained on their record.

Cruz found that during the first six months of 1982, the number of disorderly conduct arrests “jumped sharply” and mostly took place in minority police districts. The increases also coincided with the arrival of Joseph McCarthy as the deputy police superintendent. He was viewed as highly qualified and efficient by many, and Gestapo-like by others. During his earlier tenure as commander of the 13th District, disorderly conduct arrests shot up 41.6 percent in the span of one year, from 8,724 in 1980 to 12,358 in 1981.

As sweeps became more common, it became precarious to stand on a street corner, Cruz said. He saw it himself while living in Humboldt Park in the ‘80s.

A few months after Cruz’s story was published, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit, seeking an injunction against future arrests. “They only needed the leverage. They had been getting complaints for a long time, but when my article came up, they had some ammunition,” Cruz said.

The city eventually agreed to stop making disorderly conduct arrests.

“If you know anything about the Reporter, it prides itself on being very well-documented,” Cruz said. “The statistics are there. This isn’t hokey-pokey stuff.”

]]>When South Shore’s grades went southhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/when-south-shores-grades-went-south/
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:04 +0000http://chicago-reporter.dev.cshp.co/when-south-shores-grades-went-south/Ann Grimes and Laura S. Washington were no strangers to taking on a challenging project, but when TV producer Scott Craig asked The Chicago Reporter to collaborate with him on a full-scale investigation into Chicago Public Schools, the duo found that it was trying from the get-go.

The task: Find an “average” Chicago high school. Not the best, nor the worst, to paint a fair depiction of the city’s public schools. Grimes and Washington found South Shore High School, a place with both inadequacies and progress–in test scores, vocational training and other programs.

When they rolled into South Shore, cameras and a production crew in tow, then-Principal William Marshall was cooperative but defensive. Though the reporters’ decision to investigate the high school was motivated by a desire to be fair and balanced, many were suspicious.

“I think that some people in the community felt that we had unfairly singled them out,” Grimes said.

The September 1984 story, which became the basis for a segment in the CBS documentary, reported that, while South Shore was an “average” school, it fell far short of the minimal expectations.

Though there was some resentment, the story “spelled out” the systemic problems of Chicago’s public education, Washington said.

“We showed that the inadequacies of the public school system were endemic and not just about the worst neighborhoods,” she said.

After the story, Grimes and Washington moved on: Grimes to other Reporter stories and Washington to serve as then-Mayor Harold Washington’s deputy press secretary.

The documentary, was the Reporter’s first collaboration with a national outlet, and its broadcast had an impact.

At the time, Illinois legislators were championing education reform, Grimes said.

Prompted by the Reporter’s investigation, then-CPS Superintendent Ruth Love appointed a 26-member task force to investigate conditions at South Shore.

The task force, made up of administrators, teachers, politicians and parents, found in its report a high rate of student failure, poor teacher morale, and drastic shortages of books and equipment. It also noted “insufficient science laboratories, lack of computers in mathematics and science classrooms, lack of physical science and earth-science laboratory equipment, lack of class sets of dictionaries and lack of texts appropriate for all learning levels.”

The task force called for spending more than a half-million dollars to restore the institution and also recommended that teachers be given a key role in shaping instruction.

But two years later, when Grimes and the same production team returned to South Shore, not much had changed. The January 1987 article, “Return to South Shore: High school struggles to make the grade,” found that, though time and money had brought some changes, many of the acute problems remained.

There were physical changes at South Shore. A building was repainted, graffiti was removed, and old carpeting, tile and lighting fixtures were replaced.

Yet, South Shore was still a school seeking a clear mission.

]]>A look at the other side of the trackhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/look-other-side-track/
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:03 +0000http://chicago-reporter.dev.cshp.co/look-other-side-track/Its one-mile oval of green turf sits beneath a clear blue sky, eliciting an elegant appearance and experience. But the Arlington International Racecourse in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs had a secret, and it wasn’t pretty.

Danielle Gordon took an official tour of Arlington’s pristine grounds on the suspicion that something was awry. Instead of spending the hour on the sanctioned route, she changed course and happened upon the backstretch.

Next to the horse stables and hidden from the crowds were 12-by-12 dormitories made of concrete blocks. It was damp, it was bleak and it was simply “stunning,” she said.

Gordon’s March 1995 article surfaced the plight of about 1,500 workers and their families who lived at the track but “did not share in Arlington’s splendor.”

Gordon, who now works as digital content manager at the Chicago Tribune, found that the living units offered little ventilation and basic needs like telephone access and kitchen facilities. Many residents were forced to do their cooking in the communal bathrooms. Laundry was being washed in the restroom sink. Because of these conditions, Gordon learned, a rare strain of dysentery broke out in two of the dorms in August 1994, leaving 17 people infected.

“It wasn’t something you would expect to find behind such a pristine race track,” Gordon said.

Inspectors from the Illinois Department of Public Health found a slew of violations. The Illinois Plumbing Code required family living quarters to contain one lavatory and shower per unit. Four bathrooms existed in each of the three oldest buildings, which had more than 150 units, and more than 13 people were sharing one shower.

Arlington officials reasoned that living elsewhere was an option. The track workers countered that most of the housing in Arlington Heights was unaffordable.

The five-month-long investigation had its share of difficulties. One was the language barrier. Gordon doesn’t speak Spanish, and a majority of the backstretch workers were Latino immigrants–mostly from Mexico. She would bring a translator to the track and hope that someone would talk to her.

“People were scared to talk and were very afraid,” she said. Many were undocumented and feared losing their jobs, she added.

After Gordon’s interview, state Sen. John Cullerton said that he would make it “my business to raise this issue.”

A bill was drafted by a governor’s task force on horse racing, led by Cullerton, to force all race tracks in the state to spend half of their Illinois Race Track Improvement Fund–a reserve fund created to defray the costs of track improvements–on the backstretch. It was signed into law as part of an amendment to the Illinois Horse Racing Act of 1975.